Two hundred Yearly Meetings ago, Quaker history turned a corner. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1758 was more than an event in sectarian annals: it was one of the turning points in the moral history of the Western world, for it was the moment when, for the first time, an organized Christian body considered the practice of slaveowning in the light of religious principles and not only condemned it but took decisive steps to eliminate it. As is so often the case, one man pointed the way-one man whose troubled conscience galvanized the whole Quaker community and precipitated the action towards which Friends had been irresolutely moving for three or four generations. We shall do well in 1958 to pause and recall the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1758 and how it was stirred by the prophetic voice of John Woolman.
It was a trying time for Philadelphia Friends. Only two years before, the outbreak of Indian war on the Pennsylvania frontier had caused the Quakers to abdicate their control of the provincial government. The Yearly Meeting of 1758 put its seal on this action by warning its members against holding office in wartime. After three quarters of a century of unbroken political dominance, Friends were challenged to turn inward, to ponder the ravages which long preoccupation with outward affairs had wrought in their moral and spiritual life. John Woolman was concerned that this self-examination and self-purgation should not stop short of a thoroughgoing “reformation.” The moral obtuseness which allowed Friends, while officially frowning on the buying and selling of human flesh, to persist in holding men and women as was, in his mind, the point at which they needed most earnestly to consider how inconsistent their actual practice was with their religious professions.
He knew what slavery was in all its essential inhumanity. He was just back from a trip through the South “towards obtaining that purity which it iswhere the oppression of the slaves had seemed to him like “a dark gloominess hanging over the land.” Before Yearly Meeting opened- it was held in Burlington, New Jersey, in September that year- he knew that certain prominent Friends had actually purchased slaves during the summer in defiance of the Meeting’s advice. He was shocked and saddened to hear it proposed on the floor Yearly Meeting that the advice against slave buying be modified. He sat in suffering silence while one Friend after another rose to offer counsels of expediency-that no action be taken against present offenders but only against such as should buy slaves “in future,” that nothing be done at all, in the hope that “the Lord in time to come might open a way” for the deliverance of the unfortunate slaves.
Now he could remain silent no longer. Under great exercise of spirit he rose and spoke words whose solemnity and urgency must have made everyone realize that he was speaking “with a clear understanding of the mind of Truth.” “Many slaves on this continent are oppressed,” he said, “and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High!” He reminded his hearers that God in His infinite love and goodness had opened the understanding of Friends from time to time respecting their duty towards the Negro people. “It is not a time for delay.” Surely everysylvania one in the crowded meeting house on Main Street was listening intently now to the Friend from Mount Holly. “Should we now be sensible,” he went on, “of what [God] requires of us, and through a respect to the outward interest of some persons, or through a regard to some friendships which do not stand on the immutable foundation, neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, still waiting for some extraordinary means to bring about their freedom, it may be that by terrible things in righteousness God may answer us in this matter.”
John Woolman’s thrilling words put an end to all temporizing. A forthright minute was adopted reminding Friends of “the desolating calamities of war and bloodshed” that had fallen on the land and urging them to set their bondmen free at once. A committee was appointed —John Woolman one of its members—to visit every family within the compass of the Yearly Meeting and to labor with them “towards obtaining that purity which it is evidently our duty to press after.” The desired result was not achieved quickly: after all, there were some thousands of families to be visited, and men are not easily persuaded to surrender what they conceive to be their property. But by the end of twenty years there was not a slaveholder left in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and within a few more years the same could be said of every Yearly Meetthe in North America.
Slavery finally disappeared from the United States almost a century ago. But the pattern of racial discrimination, ranging in its manifestations from the subtle to the obvious, persists. The bicentenary of the momentous Yearly Meeting of 1758 is a good time to remember what John Woolman never forgot, that “oppression in more refined appearances remains to be oppression.”